Reanimated Past

It comes back again and again and again —

Half dead, half living, untamed.

A ghost wearing steel-toed, spiked cleats.

A slow scrape drags toward me. 

Hauling grief I thought I had finally put away.

But grievances are cunning.

A quiet receipt of a final sale with invisible fine print.

Dormant, they wait.

A patience beyond comprehension.

Deceiving days, weeks, years —

Decades.

Not a creeping thought to sound,

No sullen tear to be felled,

No midnight's scream to be silenced.

Until —

There is.

Faces of the foul beasts who robbed me of my innocence, my childhood, my youth, staring me down as my eyelids fall in to sleep.

Those steel-toed spikes pounding underneath my ribs, over and over and over —

Relentlessly unburdened by restraint.

Until —

I grab my pen.

I name my trespassers, my abusers, my pain.

I lay it all out between the lines.

Confessing their sins.

Baring my shame.

Admitting my faults and afflictions, regrets and lack of faith.

I lay my entire life in flames and watch the cinder bury my history.

Every last morsel, every last truth,

Every last moment when someone told me that it was all right —

When everything was wrong.

Just because I was a certain way, a certain age, a certain —

Thing.

I am a person.

I am human.

I am allowed to exist.

I am allowed to be without being suppressed beneath fear.

— That’s what they say, anyway. —

My pen scrolls.

The ink dries and my confessions fade.

A rolled parchment tied tight with a pretty little ribbon in a pretty little bow, burnt and sent off into the never —

Never keeps them away.

Temporary —

Is my release, my relief, a brief —

Remission.

An intermission to try and gather myself back up out of the dirt,

Repair the damage,

Find what I lost or mourn the loss.

My demons’ transgressions run deep below my veins —

I’ve tried to excise them, but all I found were more demons,

Having their way.

Temporary —

But, even so, however transient it might be, it is a welcomed dream to not wake up for just one night, drenched and screaming.

Edges trembling to the quivering beat of my lips as the welling crests, spilling down my cheeks, trying to remember how to breathe.

Hope, for me, is but a fossilized flicker,

Of a long-extinguished light.

So, I write it all down again,

And again,

And again.